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Richard Atterer
Automatic Test Data Generation From VDM-SL Specifications
Dissertation submitted as part of a Software Engineering project, University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 2000

Testing is an important aspect of software development and plays a major role in detecting errors in implementations. Tests are often performed manually and at random, which is problematic because it is time-consuming and there is no way of telling how well a software component has been tested. Additionally, the "random" test inputs are determined by a human, which can mean that the corner case that has escaped the implementor's attention may well also not be noticed by the tester. It seems obvious that testing should also (at least in part) be done by computers. However, this proves difficult when only the program source is available, as any tool analysing it will hardly be able to tell what the code is supposed to do. For this reason, one approach to automatic test data generation is not to use the source code, but an additional, high-level and abstract specification which describes the behaviour of a component. The program developed for this project is a partial implementation of such a test data generation tool.